The late Dave Smith with Tom Oberheim, Marcus Ryle, Tony Karavidas talking OB-X8 design

We’re fortunate for all the time we get to spend together talking about the stuff we love and meeting the people who make our musical instruments. And that time is always limited. So this moment from the OB-X8 team is especially worth watching for all four designers – and RIP, Dave.

Healing, history, and a future reclaimed: Nina Pixel deep dive from Signals Festival

Ancestral Archaeology is more than the title of Nina Pixel’s new double-album. It’s an urgent practice at a moment of crisis for Slovakia and the world, taking a critical and scientific approach to folklore’s legacy, rather than a fetishistic one.

The Commodordion: 8-bit instrument made of taped-together C64s and floppies

Eat your heart out, Roland V-Accordion. Meet the Commodordion, an 8-bit chip instrument with bellows made of floppies and gaffer tape – and a surprisingly deep feature set.

Moog Moogerfooger are all back in plug-in form for Mac and Windows

Software giveth back what hardware scarity hath taketh away. The beloved (and now discontinued) Moogerfooger range is now back in full in plug-in form. And yes, they have fake wood side-panels, too.

Brutal, creative sound worlds in 4-part compilation from Paula Temple’s Noise Manifesto

Distort sound, distort norms – that’s the watchcry of Paula Temple’s Noise Manifesto. But even though it’s a celebration of ten years of the label, if you love any distortion at all, you owe it yourself to tune into this four-part guide to some of the most inventive sonic destruction around.

New cables.gl: VR, collaboration, and more tweaks and toys for free visual programming tool

The free cable salad-for-visuals tool for the Web gets another big update for October, with everything from enhanced usability to open browser-based VR.

ValhallaWrapper gives Valhalla DSP reverbs native Ableton Live UIs

Window shuffle, be gone! ValhallaWrapper is a clever name-your-price Max for Live add-on by Elisa Hom that simulates the UIs for these beloved reverbs — as if they were native Live Devices.

Strymon’s Big Sky reverb is now a plug-in, too

Everything hardware is software; everything software is hardware. Now you can add Styrmon’s legendary Big Sky reverb, known to boutique pedal fans, in plug-in format.

Arturia Rendez-vous: all the announcements, all the new stuff

Arturia is dropping four products in one day: MiniLab 3 keyboard, Augmented GRAND PIANO plug-in, MiniFuse 4 audio interface, and the MiniFreak synthesizer. Here’s the scoop on each.

Here’s what to know about Note, Ableton’s music sketchpad for iOS

Ableton today is releasing Note, its first iOS app, alongside Ableton Live 11.2.5 with support for Ableton Cloud. The app lets you sketch new ideas on your iPhone or iPad and open them in Ableton Live. Here’s how that works. I’ve been working with a prerelease version of Ableton Note and got to tour the […]